The urban-to-rural transect is a New Urbanist planning framework that prescribes a smooth continuum of settlements that go from least dense to most dense. The six zones are as follows: natural (T1), rural (T2), sub-urban (T3), general urban (T4), center (T5), and core (T6). Part… Read More
Rachelle Younglai’s recent piece in the Globe and Mail does a great job summarizing Canada’s COVID-19 housing boom. The title of the article is, “How Canada’s real estate market defied expectations in the COVID-19 pandemic.” Non-mortgage debt is down. Mortgage debt is up. Money is… Read More
Proptech Collective has just published their inaugural 2021 Proptech in Canada report. Here are a couple of screen grabs that you all might find interesting: What these images should tell you is that the Canadian proptech landscape is fairly Toronto-centric, but that it’s also very… Read More
This is an excellent article by Alex Bozikovic, Joe Castaldo and Danielle Webb about the 15-minute city. In it, they do a block-by-block analysis of how many Canadians actually live in what they are calling an “amenity dense” neighborhood. Their definition of amenity dense: Grocery… Read More
I recently discovered a company called Hinter (a colleague, who clearly knows me very well, sent it to me). It’s exactly the kind of the company that I would love to start, if only there were 30 hours in a day. They’re a non-traditional hotel… Read More
I was in Montreal for the long weekend and I decided to take the time off from writing. I don’t do that very often, but it was the right thing to do this past weekend. Montreal is one of my favorite cities. I spent quite… Read More
I received an email this week from a senior real estate executive who was sharing the fact that, in response to COVID, he had decided to give up driving completely. He was now cycling everywhere — whether for work or for personal errands. And it… Read More
This week, RBC Economics published a study on Canada’s rental market where they argued that the pace of new supply needs to at least double in markets like Toronto in order to meet future housing demand and balance the market. Similar things, I’m sure, could… Read More
A colleague of mine sent me this Bloomberg article today and said, “Here’s an article about things you already know.” The article cites a recent report by Altus Group that compared government-related fees on new housing across Canada and the U.S. What they discovered will… Read More
In March 2018, Statistics Canada launched the largest “wastewater-based epidemiology pilot test” ever conducted in North America. Over a 12 month period, it collected wastewater samples across the country in order to test for traces of cannabis and other drugs. The pilot captured 8.4 million… Read More
